A home network is a computerized network which links together, in a wire-based or wireless manner, the appliances and devices of a house that are able to inter-communicate. A home network generally comprises a home gateway which fulfills a network switch function by linking the devices of the house in a wire-based manner. The home gateway furthermore comprises a modem, of the ADSL type, configured to link the home network to a telecommunication network of the Internet type. Thus, if a sole computer is linked to the home gateway, the home network consists solely of said computer and of said gateway.
A home gateway, for example known by the protected trade name “livebox”, generally comprises a wireless access point using, in particular, wireless transmission technology based on the IEEE 802.11 radioelectric network standard and its upgrades, grouped together under the term Wifi (for “Wireless Fidelity”).
To access the home network with a device having a radio link, such as a laptop computer, a user inputs the network identification parameters into his device. In particular, he inputs or selects the name of the home network, known to the person skilled in the art under the abbreviation SSID (for “Service Set Identifier”), and, in an optional manner, an access key for the home network, such as a WEP (for “Wired Equivalent Privacy”) or WPA (for “WiFi Protected Access”) access key.
Hereinafter, the term device is understood to mean any item of equipment able to connect to the home gateway in a radio manner, such as a laptop computer or an item of equipment of the PDA type (for “Personal Digital Assistant”) known by the English name “Smartphone”.
The access point is generally activated by default in the home gateway, thereby allowing a device to connect to the home gateway when it so wishes. In practice, a user's devices connect only intermittently to said access point. Thus, most of the time, in particular at night, the access point is activated though it is unused.
It has been calculated that a home gateway needlessly consumes up to 1 Watt for an access point using 802.11 a/b/g technology and up to 2 Watts for an access point using 802.11n technology coupled with MIMO technology, known to the person skilled in the art under its English name “Multiple-Input Multiple-Output”.
To save energy, an immediate solution would be for the user to turn off his home gateway when it is not used. This presents drawbacks when the home gateway relays so-called VOIP (“Voice Over Internet Protocol”) telephonic communications. Indeed, no telephonic communication may be received when the gateway is turned off. To be able to re-access the home network via the access point, the user must manually turn on the gateway, this being constraining.